Currently, several financial management systems are available to help an individual user, or an authorized party acting on behalf of an individual user, obtain a user's financial data, process/analyze the user's financial data, and generate various reports for the user.
Financial management systems typically help users manage their finances by providing a centralized interface with banks, credit card companies, and other various financial institutions, for electronically identifying and categorizing user financial transactions. Currently, financial management systems typically obtain electronic transaction based information, such as payee, payment amount, date, etc. via communication with banks, credit card providers, or other financial institutions, using electronic data transfer systems, or various other systems for transferring financial transaction data.
A financial management system's ability to identify and categorize specific financial transactions is what allows the financial management system to provide the features that are usually of most interest to the user. Typically, the ability to categorize specific financial transactions is, in turn, dependent on an ability of the financial management system to obtain, and properly analyze, the data necessary to identify and categorize specific financial transactions.
Using some currently available financial management systems, the electronic financial transaction data, such as payee, payment amount, date, etc. associated with a specific financial transaction is used by the financial management system to propose, and/or apply, a description to the specific financial transaction and/or a category to the specific financial transaction. As an example, if a given transaction that has a casino or hotel as the payee, the financial management system may apply a category of “entertainment” or “travel” for the financial transaction based solely on the payee being a location many people go to for entertainment, or when travelling.
While currently available financial management systems work quite effectively with credit card, ATM card, and various other types of financial transactions involving “plastic” or other electronic data-based systems, not all financial transactions involve card or other electronic data-based payment systems. For instance, any cash-based transaction, by definition, does not involve card or other electronic data-based payment systems.
Currently, some financial management systems provide the ability to more or less manually enter cash transactions/expenses into the financial management system, i.e., some financial management systems provide and “add a transaction” feature as a way to try and track cash transactions, and get a more complete picture of where the user's money is going. However, the capability to add cash transactions/expenses using a mobile application is currently largely unavailable, or overly burdensome to the user, due to several difficulties presented by mobile applications and mobile systems.
For instance, since entering cash transactions into a financial management system is currently a largely manual process, using mobile applications and mobile computing systems to enter a cash transaction into a financial management system is typically quite difficult. As a result, users often don't have time, or forget, to enter cash transaction data into a financial management system correctly when the transaction occurs. As a result, the user often waits, or tells themself they will wait, until a later time to attempt to manually enter the cash transaction data. However, at the later time, if it ever comes, the user often is not able to enter the cash transaction data into the financial management system because the user has forgotten the transaction details, and/or misplaced or lost the relevant receipts for the cash transaction.
In addition, even if the user does remember to enter a cash transaction into the financial management system, because the process is currently largely manual, it still takes significant time to record the cash transaction i.e. to fill out transaction details such as description, category, etc. Even when some automation is provided, such as a list, or pull down menu, showing transaction categories, the process is often still cumbersome and difficult using a mobile computing system. This is partly true because many financial management systems have hundreds of categories, including subcategories, and the user's own categories, and choosing one out of so many categories is often not a trivial task using a mobile computing system and mobile computing system display and interface. This situation is particularly problematic when the user has to enter several cash transactions and categorize them at one time.
In addition, typing and tagging on a mobile computing system, such as a smart-phone, is often difficult, tedious, and error-prone. This is largely because, while “qwerty” keyboards may be made to fit in a space less than 2″ wide on a mobile computing system, this fact does not necessarily mean that the keyboard is easy and/or efficient to use, or even practical.
As a result of the situation described above, current financial management systems are severely limited in their ability to capture cash transaction data using a mobile application and mobile computing system. In a world that is rapidly moving to a mobile computing system model, where mobile computing systems, such smart phones, have become more affordable and capable, and users have come to rely, and to expect, more and more functionality from these devices, this is a significant limitation
Clearly this situation is not ideal for either the users of the mobile computing systems and financial management systems or the providers of the mobile computing systems and financial management systems.